Teachers generally work alone in a classroom whereas cops generally work shoulder-to-shoulder in partnerships or teams in the field. I suspect career cops would show little respect for these student interns and would not work the beat with them in earnest, and without that, the partnership would not work and the Police for America participants would have little influence or impact.
Has Matt just ignore or waived aside the most important challenge to this this PfA idea of his?
The culture of police departments is just INCREDIBLY different than the culture of schools. The former tends towards political conservatism and authoritarianism (i.e., rank, command and control, etc.), whereas the latter tends towards political progressivism and autonomy. (Yeah, that's a HUGE oversimplification, so I leave it for the reader to think harder about those details.)
Which of those appear closer to the culture of elite college graduates? Which profession do elite college graduates profess more respect for? Which profession is more aligned towards creating more elite college graduates?
I do not see anywhere in here a real consideration of the recruitment challenge for a PfA program. I don't mean hours, or working conditions or training. I mean cultural fit. It just seems incredibly off.
I know the topic is police and not teachers but wondering if the unique pension plan for teachers does zero to garner young talent. Better route is to pay better at the outset and don't provide the back end bonus (which only serves to keep folks hanging on).
I absolutely love this article. Keli Goff wrote a very similar piece not long after Michael Brown was killed. The more people from the upper and middle classes become cops, even if only for a few years, the better the balance we can strike between needed reforms and reducing crime. And the easier it will be to fire bad cops before they seriously hurt someone.
I work for TFA full-time and teach part-time (the teacher shortage, while maybe not nationally salient, is very acute in my region).I think this post hits the nail on the head. So much of educational inequity, in my experience, comes from high-quality teachers being a scarce resource hoarded by affluent districts.
In my work, we do our best to find school leaders who have a strong vision for where they want to take their organization but maybe lack the human capital (staff) to get sufficient buy-in to carry that out. A PFA-like program could allow reform-minded police chiefs to bare the medium-term retention risk but gain some high-capacity, highly motivated recruits to enact that vision in the short-run.
On the downside, PFA participants should probably get more training than traditional TFA candidates before entering the front lines (physical fitness, firearms training, de-escalation, etc.), creating a lag effect in your pipeline. Additionally, though TFA has certainly moderated my own views on education, the org as a whole is very subject to left-wing echo chambers that can lead to dysfunction and disconnection from reality. I think we're far from the worst offenders (https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture/), but I think PFA would be subject to the same ideological weaknesses
This is going to get buried in the comments but also AMA about TFA/teaching.
In response to your AMA: how do teachers in traditional schools generally feel about charter schools? I know some charters have become unionized in recent years, but are teachers as skeptical as their unions have historically been?
I think both the praises and criticisms of charters are more or less correct.
It's a trope in ed reform that it's impossible to reform a school because nobody can agree on what it is that a school should do. So IMO, the main upswing to charter schools is that it can create a strong foundation to set a vision for achievement and actually... achieve it.
Do they siphon high-achieving students, motivated parents and funding away from traditional schools? Probably yes. But I do think they expand opportunity and access on the margin for those very same families (who are disproportionately low-income).
This, and more broadly the take that our best feasible police reform is to professionalize them by requiring college degrees, is the piece of Yglesias Thought I have been most persuaded by. Reluctantly, because it seems like… sort of small beer. But nothing else is politically possible. These are some generally quite bad institutions with almost impregnable political power. Sometimes the best you can do is something small, and finding hacks to get some libs and good people onto the force may be it.
how do you conclude that America's police are a "bad" institution? To me that reads like a glass half empty take. Compared to what...a European country with 10x less violent crime and 10x less guns? Compared to a Latina American country with 10x times of each? I certainly wouldn't trade our police for those of most the rest of the Western Hemisphere's, for example.
Great idea! I think you can take this model to many areas that are short on qualified resources because they traditionally do not pay well and require a college education. Social work and nursing come to mind, maybe public defenders and primary care physicians as well. Education benefits and health care, similar to the GI Bill and the VA for the military, may also be a good incentive and a win-win for all involved. I think we are stuck unnecessarily in an education/employment/compensation model developed a century ago when the needs of society were vastly different than today’s. Would love to see our politicians talk about stuff like this rather than what they waste their time on now.
I am fortunate that I do not have to deal with the police, but among my few interactions were not positive. Someone broke into my car and stole a bunch of things. To be clear: I was dumb. I left my car outside, and had my window cracked open. In a way, you could say I was asking for it. The police showed up, took a report, and then...did nothing. They stole a laptop, and I had the location using the "Find My Apple Device" service and they refused to go. They told me to call if I got another ping (since my ping was several hours old), and when it changed I called the cop. No answer. Called the mainline. No answer. Called again, got someone who said they would resend the officer back to my house to reinterview me before they visit the house. No cop ever came.
The only thing they said was my car license had expired. Not very helpful.
Overall, I respect cops and think they have a thankless job. I go out of my way to appreciate their work. But when they literally do nothing to prevent crime it becomes very difficult to sympathize with them.
Genuinely curious about the legalities of this situation (not to discount the possibility of the police being lazy and/or overwhelmed); I know most federal agents can make arrests for any misdemeanors they personally observe and for all felonies with reasonable evidence to support PC (i.e someone tells you "this guy just stabbed someone" and you see the man with blood on his hands). What is the legal status of a FMAD ping? Would that support a search warrant for your average judge? If we assume the average MacBook exceeds the common $1K threshold for felony theft, can a cop perform a search of a structure or vehicle without consent if he believes the ping is legit?
Their reasoning was that since it was several hours old there was no point in going because it likely wasn’t there. That was what the cop told me to my face almost verbatim
I teach a class on "Politics of Criminal Justice" to junior and senior political science majors. Last semester, I asked my class how many of them who identified as progressive would be willing to serve in the police. No one raised their hands. As far as I can tell, my progressive students were far more impressed by the progressive prosecutor movement, and many want to become defense attorneys. They just think of the police as the enemies, not people who can help America become safer. In contrast, my conservative students are far more open to a career in law enforcement. In short, I'm just not sure many progressive young adults would be open to Police for America.
When I asked, one of my students said that policing is in a "transitional phase" and that this phase would be rocky. But, no, none of my progressive students had real answer to that question.
Got me. The progressive kids are really into investing in social services, schools, drug treatment, etc.. However, and this is the funny part, most of them want the police to respond if they call 911! It makes them feel "safe" to know that if they get in a tight spot, they can call and someone will come.
The obvious problem or challenge here is these “Police for America” officers would be absolutely hated by all the other officers. They would be on their own.
Why do you assume that? They would presumably have to go through the same police training as all other recruits: If they successfully completed that why would other officers hate them?
I can’t prove my theory is true. But my gut, for whatever that is worth, tells me these guys/gals either get “assimilated to the Borg” / start to view the world like most of those inner city cops yglesias references or they are despised as snoody outsiders who are at best laughable.
Some version of the assimilation theory is probably true of every job, right?
I don't quite qet the assumption that they would be hated, though. It would probably depend a lot on how the program was presented. Every time I've interacted with real cops on a personal level or even from watching a documentary they are just individuals like anyone else with a surprisingly large range of views. The distribution of views might be shifted in certain ways on some issues but "we hate ivy leaguers who want to volunteer years of their lives to come work with us" isn't an assumption I'd make.
I am very pessimistic that there are any easy solutions to make cops despise the people they police less. And to be fair to the cops, maybe it’s just human nature when the inner city is so bad.
I do wonder how many Peter Moskos's there are out there who would be willing to join PFA and would survive the existing police culture. But I would sure love to see some local pilot programs to see what happens. We don't need a big national program; let's try that laboratories of democracy thing first.
But my bigger question is what kind of policing they would do. Would they partner with other cops cruising neighborhoods? Would those more senior cops have any trust in these barely trained drop-in people? We sorely need Graham to be reading SB these days.
When I was in law school at prestigious public school one of my classmates opted to join the LAPD over working as an attorney. He definitely did so with the ambition to move up through the ranks to leadership in shortish order but it was a very controversial choice but I one that I mostly admired (this was in 1998 and LAPD was still seen as quite a corrupt agency with little respect for civil rights and liberties -- the O.J. verdict is in 1995). Since then I have often thought that there should be a more regularized pathway from legal training not just to being a DA, but also into policing.
Have two friends with liberal arts degrees from good schools and initial career focuses in the arts who became big-city Texas cops in their mid-to-late 20s because they flat needed a job. Both were good guys with liberal politics. Within a couple years, both had been completely captured by police culture and conservative politics.
One left the city job for a promotion on the police force of an affluent suburb. In the last couple years, he's become very anti-Trump and back to being liberal. The other one made big-city detective and remains 100% cop.
Some of these PFA folks are gonna end up going full police. You have to have an extremely strong moral backbone and character not to.
Is it possible that some aspects of it is correctly seeing some flaws in progressive solutions and politics? When it comes to criminal justice and policing that's an area that I personally think the Dems are worse than the Rs on, so I'm not personally very surprised or judgemental if people for whom that's very salient vote based on that issue.
It’s true that just creating degree requirements would likely exacerbate shortages and PFA itself is a great idea. I think the middle cut is also expanding the share of ppl with prior negative interaction with police who can become cops themselves. Implementing both PFA and a cop ROTC that funnels toward PFA targeted departments both expands college access for future cops without the shortages. But this line of thinking is the way overall
Teachers generally work alone in a classroom whereas cops generally work shoulder-to-shoulder in partnerships or teams in the field. I suspect career cops would show little respect for these student interns and would not work the beat with them in earnest, and without that, the partnership would not work and the Police for America participants would have little influence or impact.
Has Matt just ignore or waived aside the most important challenge to this this PfA idea of his?
The culture of police departments is just INCREDIBLY different than the culture of schools. The former tends towards political conservatism and authoritarianism (i.e., rank, command and control, etc.), whereas the latter tends towards political progressivism and autonomy. (Yeah, that's a HUGE oversimplification, so I leave it for the reader to think harder about those details.)
Which of those appear closer to the culture of elite college graduates? Which profession do elite college graduates profess more respect for? Which profession is more aligned towards creating more elite college graduates?
I do not see anywhere in here a real consideration of the recruitment challenge for a PfA program. I don't mean hours, or working conditions or training. I mean cultural fit. It just seems incredibly off.
Great idea. Hope this catches on.
I know the topic is police and not teachers but wondering if the unique pension plan for teachers does zero to garner young talent. Better route is to pay better at the outset and don't provide the back end bonus (which only serves to keep folks hanging on).
I absolutely love this article. Keli Goff wrote a very similar piece not long after Michael Brown was killed. The more people from the upper and middle classes become cops, even if only for a few years, the better the balance we can strike between needed reforms and reducing crime. And the easier it will be to fire bad cops before they seriously hurt someone.
I work for TFA full-time and teach part-time (the teacher shortage, while maybe not nationally salient, is very acute in my region).I think this post hits the nail on the head. So much of educational inequity, in my experience, comes from high-quality teachers being a scarce resource hoarded by affluent districts.
In my work, we do our best to find school leaders who have a strong vision for where they want to take their organization but maybe lack the human capital (staff) to get sufficient buy-in to carry that out. A PFA-like program could allow reform-minded police chiefs to bare the medium-term retention risk but gain some high-capacity, highly motivated recruits to enact that vision in the short-run.
On the downside, PFA participants should probably get more training than traditional TFA candidates before entering the front lines (physical fitness, firearms training, de-escalation, etc.), creating a lag effect in your pipeline. Additionally, though TFA has certainly moderated my own views on education, the org as a whole is very subject to left-wing echo chambers that can lead to dysfunction and disconnection from reality. I think we're far from the worst offenders (https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture/), but I think PFA would be subject to the same ideological weaknesses
This is going to get buried in the comments but also AMA about TFA/teaching.
Thank you, Adam. Great comments.
In response to your AMA: how do teachers in traditional schools generally feel about charter schools? I know some charters have become unionized in recent years, but are teachers as skeptical as their unions have historically been?
I think both the praises and criticisms of charters are more or less correct.
It's a trope in ed reform that it's impossible to reform a school because nobody can agree on what it is that a school should do. So IMO, the main upswing to charter schools is that it can create a strong foundation to set a vision for achievement and actually... achieve it.
Do they siphon high-achieving students, motivated parents and funding away from traditional schools? Probably yes. But I do think they expand opportunity and access on the margin for those very same families (who are disproportionately low-income).
This, and more broadly the take that our best feasible police reform is to professionalize them by requiring college degrees, is the piece of Yglesias Thought I have been most persuaded by. Reluctantly, because it seems like… sort of small beer. But nothing else is politically possible. These are some generally quite bad institutions with almost impregnable political power. Sometimes the best you can do is something small, and finding hacks to get some libs and good people onto the force may be it.
how do you conclude that America's police are a "bad" institution? To me that reads like a glass half empty take. Compared to what...a European country with 10x less violent crime and 10x less guns? Compared to a Latina American country with 10x times of each? I certainly wouldn't trade our police for those of most the rest of the Western Hemisphere's, for example.
Great idea! I think you can take this model to many areas that are short on qualified resources because they traditionally do not pay well and require a college education. Social work and nursing come to mind, maybe public defenders and primary care physicians as well. Education benefits and health care, similar to the GI Bill and the VA for the military, may also be a good incentive and a win-win for all involved. I think we are stuck unnecessarily in an education/employment/compensation model developed a century ago when the needs of society were vastly different than today’s. Would love to see our politicians talk about stuff like this rather than what they waste their time on now.
"Police strike" is certainly a way of describing police following very explicit orders from politicians to cut back on their normal activities.
I am fortunate that I do not have to deal with the police, but among my few interactions were not positive. Someone broke into my car and stole a bunch of things. To be clear: I was dumb. I left my car outside, and had my window cracked open. In a way, you could say I was asking for it. The police showed up, took a report, and then...did nothing. They stole a laptop, and I had the location using the "Find My Apple Device" service and they refused to go. They told me to call if I got another ping (since my ping was several hours old), and when it changed I called the cop. No answer. Called the mainline. No answer. Called again, got someone who said they would resend the officer back to my house to reinterview me before they visit the house. No cop ever came.
The only thing they said was my car license had expired. Not very helpful.
Overall, I respect cops and think they have a thankless job. I go out of my way to appreciate their work. But when they literally do nothing to prevent crime it becomes very difficult to sympathize with them.
Genuinely curious about the legalities of this situation (not to discount the possibility of the police being lazy and/or overwhelmed); I know most federal agents can make arrests for any misdemeanors they personally observe and for all felonies with reasonable evidence to support PC (i.e someone tells you "this guy just stabbed someone" and you see the man with blood on his hands). What is the legal status of a FMAD ping? Would that support a search warrant for your average judge? If we assume the average MacBook exceeds the common $1K threshold for felony theft, can a cop perform a search of a structure or vehicle without consent if he believes the ping is legit?
Their reasoning was that since it was several hours old there was no point in going because it likely wasn’t there. That was what the cop told me to my face almost verbatim
I teach a class on "Politics of Criminal Justice" to junior and senior political science majors. Last semester, I asked my class how many of them who identified as progressive would be willing to serve in the police. No one raised their hands. As far as I can tell, my progressive students were far more impressed by the progressive prosecutor movement, and many want to become defense attorneys. They just think of the police as the enemies, not people who can help America become safer. In contrast, my conservative students are far more open to a career in law enforcement. In short, I'm just not sure many progressive young adults would be open to Police for America.
Do you ever ask them how they expect policing to get better if none of the police critics are willing to do the job?
When I asked, one of my students said that policing is in a "transitional phase" and that this phase would be rocky. But, no, none of my progressive students had real answer to that question.
What comes after the “transitional phase”? Vigilantism, or utopia?
Got me. The progressive kids are really into investing in social services, schools, drug treatment, etc.. However, and this is the funny part, most of them want the police to respond if they call 911! It makes them feel "safe" to know that if they get in a tight spot, they can call and someone will come.
The obvious problem or challenge here is these “Police for America” officers would be absolutely hated by all the other officers. They would be on their own.
Why do you assume that? They would presumably have to go through the same police training as all other recruits: If they successfully completed that why would other officers hate them?
I can’t prove my theory is true. But my gut, for whatever that is worth, tells me these guys/gals either get “assimilated to the Borg” / start to view the world like most of those inner city cops yglesias references or they are despised as snoody outsiders who are at best laughable.
Some version of the assimilation theory is probably true of every job, right?
I don't quite qet the assumption that they would be hated, though. It would probably depend a lot on how the program was presented. Every time I've interacted with real cops on a personal level or even from watching a documentary they are just individuals like anyone else with a surprisingly large range of views. The distribution of views might be shifted in certain ways on some issues but "we hate ivy leaguers who want to volunteer years of their lives to come work with us" isn't an assumption I'd make.
I am very pessimistic that there are any easy solutions to make cops despise the people they police less. And to be fair to the cops, maybe it’s just human nature when the inner city is so bad.
Do most cops despise the people they police or just in the inner city?
I do wonder how many Peter Moskos's there are out there who would be willing to join PFA and would survive the existing police culture. But I would sure love to see some local pilot programs to see what happens. We don't need a big national program; let's try that laboratories of democracy thing first.
But my bigger question is what kind of policing they would do. Would they partner with other cops cruising neighborhoods? Would those more senior cops have any trust in these barely trained drop-in people? We sorely need Graham to be reading SB these days.
When I was in law school at prestigious public school one of my classmates opted to join the LAPD over working as an attorney. He definitely did so with the ambition to move up through the ranks to leadership in shortish order but it was a very controversial choice but I one that I mostly admired (this was in 1998 and LAPD was still seen as quite a corrupt agency with little respect for civil rights and liberties -- the O.J. verdict is in 1995). Since then I have often thought that there should be a more regularized pathway from legal training not just to being a DA, but also into policing.
Have two friends with liberal arts degrees from good schools and initial career focuses in the arts who became big-city Texas cops in their mid-to-late 20s because they flat needed a job. Both were good guys with liberal politics. Within a couple years, both had been completely captured by police culture and conservative politics.
One left the city job for a promotion on the police force of an affluent suburb. In the last couple years, he's become very anti-Trump and back to being liberal. The other one made big-city detective and remains 100% cop.
Some of these PFA folks are gonna end up going full police. You have to have an extremely strong moral backbone and character not to.
What is "going full police" in these cases?
Is it possible that some aspects of it is correctly seeing some flaws in progressive solutions and politics? When it comes to criminal justice and policing that's an area that I personally think the Dems are worse than the Rs on, so I'm not personally very surprised or judgemental if people for whom that's very salient vote based on that issue.
What is the best outcome or reform then? How do you hire people who would never accept the position?
It’s true that just creating degree requirements would likely exacerbate shortages and PFA itself is a great idea. I think the middle cut is also expanding the share of ppl with prior negative interaction with police who can become cops themselves. Implementing both PFA and a cop ROTC that funnels toward PFA targeted departments both expands college access for future cops without the shortages. But this line of thinking is the way overall